Neither Hope Nor Hate

My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Cortez, started out the school year by getting us excited to learn. She told us we would solve word problems, add and subtract up to seven digits, and write numbers up to a billion! We would memorize one entire poem and learn all 50 states and their capitals and be able to fill them in on a blank map. Over the year, each and every one of us would be invited to her home one-on-one to make cookies for our families.  

At the end of that year, I hugged Mrs. Cortez fiercely. She waved goodbye to us as we left her classroom, wiping her glasses on her blouse. I cried all the way home on the school bus. 

Then, I went on to fifth grade. 

A day after the unbearable tragedy in Texas, I am rifling through my sons’ school pictures, fanning through each stack like a card deck of years, milestones, triumphs, setbacks. I want to remember what a fourth-grader looks like. The news is not yet showing the faces of the 19 tiny victims, with gaps in their teeth and princess skirts and siblings and honor roll success and anxiety over memorizing state capitals. I stop at the fourth-grade years of Pete and Silas and double over the trash can in my office, physically sick. My mind is unable to process that there will be no fifth-grade school pictures for any of these children or their families, who have been incomprehensibly cast into unspeakable despair. Their stacks of school photos will remain forever blunted by life stories violently cut short.

In moments when we are forced to confront the darkest parts of humanity, we tend to react immediately, loudly. We scratch and claw at the grip of inaction by leaders who do nothing, desperately wanting to outrun the frailty of being human in a system that relies on the competence and sanity and right action of others. We are sickened and terrified and aghast. We try to shimmy and contort ourselves away, away, away from the ludicrousness of it all, either by finding the most incompetent boor to scream at or by crawling deep under the covers or into the caverns of our mind palaces. We do everything but sit with the awful sadness of it. 

I read a few passages from Mark Nepo’s Book of Awakening each morning. Today’s started with a quote from T.H. White: “The best thing for being sad is to learn something.” 

So first, I sit. I breathe in and let the waves of grief and worry for the world and all its children crash over me, surrendering to the idea that it may take me completely away. I let myself face the misery these families are experiencing, the layers and layers and layers of loss they simply cannot bear, but of course, must. I stay like this for a long time. I do not write any emails or call any elected officials or donate any money to organizations set up for gun safety. I go through the process of sending “metta” to 16, 17, 18, 19 children and then two adults. “May you be free. May you feel love. May you rest in peace and ease.” 

In the hours and days that follow, the time will come when I get up from my contemplations and take action. I haven’t yet gathered enough coherence to be wise about it, but I have crawled up far enough to realize that neither hope nor hate are strategies. Time is too short to hinge on hope, and hating simply won’t suffice. Not hate for the gunman, who is assuredly another troubled young man in a society that has largely ignored troubled people of any sort. Not hate for the leaders, cloaked in measures of swagger and cowardice, likely governed by fears of unknowing, afraid to put down their idioms and look into the bottomless eyes of parents of dead children.  

I don’t know what to do yet. The learning starts with that, though. With the desire to learn more about what to do and divorce myself from the fraudulent scaffolding of certainty. 

 As our friend Dr. Amishi Jha tells it, our lives are simply a collection of things we pay attention to. Our brains sort and make sense from the observations and patterns we experience, consciously and unconsciously. Only by staring straight at what's broken and sitting in that space can we begin to unfold the learning, though many answers will not come easily or quickly or ever. It is a courageous, rebellious act to fold these things into ourselves and let them be part of our frail hopes, our stubborn and necessary witnessing.

So begins the possibility of learning. 

Pete (left) and Silas, when they were in fourth grade